Pets may be cute and cuddly, but make no mistake: they require tons of attention and work to keep happy and healthy. At the end of the day, doing so cultivates a relationship unlike any other — even if owners start the day with a kitchen floor full of garabage or an unexpected, ahem, suprise in a spare corner of the home.
The team behind the Chord Collar wants to keep pets happy, healthy, and engaged while reducing the aspects of pet ownership that are annoying or inconvenient by leveraging a bit of connected technology.
The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-connected collar allows owners to consistently provide rewards-based training in combination with its companion iOS and Android app, alerting owners to what needs to be worked and exactly how to do so based on the pet’s movements during the day. Health is also a big focus. The Chord Collar tracks heart rate levels and movement, letting owners know when the pet might be under the weather.
In the pursuit of safety, the Chord Collar also features a built-in speaker that plays back voice recordings of commands like “Get off the couch” and “Come here!”, for instance, triggered when a pet wanders onto an inviting sofa or past a pre-made GPS fence. That’s not the only benefit of its embedded GPS module: owners can also stay completely informed of where their pet is at all times, leveraging the data in case little Milo gets lost in a free, community sourced, web-based service. All these features come packaged in the $150 Chord Collar expected to ship in August of 2016. The $623,000 campaign is looking for success by March 1st, 2016.
The Chord Collar trumps the very similar Arden Collar by providing all the same features without a monthly cost plus the ability to remotely issue commands through the collar’s speaker — even if it’s slightly off-putting to witness what is essentially a dog being controlled through a smartphone. Something is a bit lost in that interaction but all its other aspects are very practical, a must-have for serious pet owners.